Building your brand

1. Understand branding

Your brand is the impression that your customers have of your business, comprising visual elements like your name and logo, plus their experience of interacting with your business and marketing. 

Building a strong brand sets you apart from competitors, makes you more recognisable to your customers, and increases the chance of repeat custom. It can also contribute to the valuation of your business.

To be effective, your brand needs to be consistent across every touchpoint, from your logo to your website, to tone of voice, the product or service itself, and your staff. It should clearly reflect your core values.

Once you have read our guide on the basics of branding, it's time to follow these steps to building your own brand.

2. Carry out research

To build your brand, you will first need to carry out some simple desk research into your marketplace. You will need to understand who your audience are and what they want, what brands are already out there, and where you can fit in. If you are an existing business you will also want to find out how your business is currently perceived by your audience. 

This research can also help identify gaps for your brand to help you establish a unique space in the market.

Understand your audience

To be able to connect with your audience, you’ll need to understand who your audience are, and what type of brand they will connect with. A great way to do this is to segment your audience into groups, and create audience personas (also called ‘pen portraits’) for each.

Audience personas

Audience personas are generalised representations of your ideal customers. They detail specific information about this representative customer and they must each represent a key customer group. You may have a few different ‘groups’ within your whole target audience.

Personas allow you to view your offering from your customers’ perspective, which can help you design your brand to meet their needs. Have a think about who your ideal customers are and write down what you can about them. Consider the following: 

• Who are they?
  • What is their age group and gender? 
  • Are they in a specific geographic or local area? 
  • What is their job, career path and income bracket?
  • What is their home and family situation?
  • What are their interests and hobbies likely to be (parenting, pet ownership, gastro travel, cooking outdoors, wild swimming, etc)?
  • What do they care about? (environmental issues, animal welfare, nutrition, family, etc)
  • What other brands do they like, what brands would they follow online? 
  • How do they shop (online/offline), what news sites would they visit, what websites are they on, which social platforms, etc?

• What do they want from you?
  • What would they aim to achieve by using your product or service? E.g. “I want to learn a new language.”
  • When do they consume/use your product or service?
  • How often do they consume/use your product or service?
  • What other brands do they choose for this product or service?
  • Why do they select these other brands?
  • What problems or pain points do they need to overcome which could be solved by your product or service? 

• What do you have that they want?
  • What are your unique selling points? What is it about you, your business, your culture, your staff, and your products and services that is special?
  • What specifically sets you apart from competitors' brands, and why should your audience choose you? This could be a mix of things such as price, quality, the experience you offer, your origin story, your ethos, industry knowledge, your location, manufacturing process, etc.
  • What do you get good feedback on from your existing customers and why do they choose you?
  • What are the reasons that some people wouldn’t choose you? Should you overcome this to convince these customers, or do you accept them? (E.g. for a personal trainer, if people don’t want to commit to a whole online course, could you offer a free trial? Or do you accept that these people won’t buy and make your messaging clearer).

Audience research

The best personas are built on actual research (such as surveys, and interviews with your target audience). However you can still gain excellent insight from even small-scale research that you can carry out yourself. 

• Pull together a small focus group by interviewing a few key customers or clients, or people you know who match your audience group. 
• Look at your existing customers - are there any similarities or trends in age, gender, location, products, motivations, etc?
• Run some web searches to find any information on trends within your audience groups (sites such as Google Trends, Statista, and Ofcom etc, can be useful). See our article on tools and techniques for more information.
• Look at Business Gateway’s Sector Reports for your industry or use our research service. 
• Speak to people you know who fit the bill or to your regular customers. Find out their favourite brands, websites, interests, types and formats of content, etc. 
• Use information that you know to be true about your consumers from any previous work.

Understand the competitive landscape

You also need to understand what other brands are operating in your industry and how they position themselves. This will help you decide where your brand fits in, how your brand can differentiate itself, and what your brand should be. For more information on technique, read our guide on competitor analysis.

Try to see your competitors through the eyes of the personas you have created. This could inspire your brand positioning and messaging by highlighting some values or attributes of your own business that you hadn’t thought to emphasise. Don’t focus only on their product or service, but also on messaging and how they position themselves (e.g. if your competitors are all focusing on price, you could focus on the quality of your product or service). 

Competitor analysis

Jot down the competitors that you already know of, and also have a search for your product or service (or similar service) on Google and the social platforms to identify any other competitors.

For each competitor, review:

• Brand messaging and USPs
  • What is their USP - the unique point of difference that they are pushing? Does this gel with the target audience?
  • What key messaging do they use across their customer touchpoints (like their website, social media, any ads, packaging, premises, etc)? Categorise these into themes. Do they talk about the quality of their offering, the price, their goals, etc? (For example Innocent drinks push their goal to ‘do good’, their charity work, their b-corp credentials, their real pure fruit ingredients, etc)
  • Do they have a tagline and what is it? (e.g. Nike’s ‘Just do it’)

• Brand assets
  • How do their logo, colours, graphics and imagery reflect the message they are relaying? Do these match up?

• Tone of voice
  • What tone of voice do they use in their copy and other media? (e.g. conversational and friendly, authoritative and informative, etc). Does it match with the positioning they have as a brand?

• Brand embodiment
  • What do they do best? Despite their statements, what is good about them that makes people choose them?
  • Do they embody their brand positioning in their actions? For example do they push themselves as ‘the customers’ choice’ but actually have bad reviews for customer service? (This could be an opportunity.) 

Once you have reviewed your competitors, think where your brand can fit in. Are there any areas that no competitor seems to be occupying? How do your main messages and product differ from the competition, but still meet what your audience want?

Understand your business

If you’re up and running already, your business will already have a brand - whether you’ve designed it or not. Now’s the time to understand what your existing customers and staff think about your brand. This could give valuable insight into what you want to keep or enhance, or what you want to change. 

• What do staff and customers think your brand is just now?
  • Ask your existing employees (and a small group of regular customers if you can) what they think your ‘brand’ is. Ask them what is unique about your business and how they would describe your business and your product or service to others.
  • Ask them what they like, and do not like, about your business, and your product or service
  • Consider running a quick online survey using tools such as Survey Monkey or Google Forms to help gather this information.

3. Define your brand

The next step is to determine what your brand is. What do you stand for, where do you sit in your marketplace and what is your key messaging.

Determine your brand position

When determining how you will position your brand to make you stand out from your competitors and connect with your audience, draw on all of the research that you have completed above.

Your brand position should be the area where ‘what our audience want’ overlaps with ‘what makes us special’, without any overlap of ‘what our competitors are doing well’.

For example, a cafe selling single-origin coffees and specialist cakes in an area full of home bake establishments and sandwich shops, could position themselves as the premium artisan coffee shop in the area.

Create your brand proposition

Your brand proposition is a simple statement that details exactly what your brand is and pulls all of your branding work together. It should be easy to understand and should simply define your brand to help keep brand consistency across all of your customer touchpoints. 

Your brand proposition should contain your target audience, your category, the benefits to the customer, and reasons to believe.

Your proposition should read like:

• To [target audience], our product/service is the [category] that provides [key benefits] because [reasons to believe].

For example:

• To coffee lovers in Stranraer, our service is the coffee shop and cafe that provides the finest hand brewed single-origin beans and artisan sandwiches in the area because we source all of our coffee from fair trade suppliers in South America and bake award winning sourdoughs on the premises. 

Brand values

Now you need to flesh out your brand and define its personality, by establishing your brand values. 

Brand values are the key principles that define your brand. These values should guide both how your business operates and how you interact with your customers across all touchpoints. They are the values that your business will live by. They will also inform the personality of your brand assets including your logo, your graphics and images, and the tone of voice of your copy.

Aim for 4-5 brand values, and ensure that they match with your brand position and draw on all of your research. They should align with your business practices, how you want to portray your brand, and how you want to differentiate your business from the competition.

Examples:

• From Innocent drinks, their brand values are “Natural, entrepreneurial, commercial, responsible, generous”, and these values obviously inform everything they do, including all of their business activities, the look and feel of the products, their website content, etc.

• For an artisan coffee shop, their brand values could be: Ethical, Welcoming, Expert, Accessible, Joyful.

4. Decide your brand name and tagline

If you are a new business, it’s time to work on your brand name. If you are an existing business it may not be necessary to change your name, or you may have limited scope to change your name. If you would prefer to, you will need to weigh up the costs against the benefits.

Choose your brand name

A brand name could be for your business and/or your product name. This name should be memorable, match up with your brand values and position, appeal to your customers, stand out from the competition…and be available!

 Here are some top tips for selecting your business/product name:

• Brainstorm ideas. Write some ideas down and bounce them around with staff, friends and family. 

• Match your brand. Make sure that the name you choose is representative of your brand. If you are selling brightly coloured woollen hats and you have a fun and outdoorsy brand, you will want a name to reflect this. For example ‘Borealis Bobbles’ may be a better fit than “SRG Knits”

• Check it is available. Ensure that any name you do select is available for use and not already in use by another company. Check that the social handles and domain names you want are available (look at social platforms and a domain name registration service).

• Check trademarks. It is hugely important that you ensure your proposed name is not the same or very similar to a registered trade mark and is not subject to copyright. Violation of trademarks and copyright could cause legal issues.

• Follow the rules. For certain company structures (like ​​limited companies) you have to register your name and other details with Companies House and ensure that your proposed name does not breach the rules on name endings, 'same as' rules or include a prescribed or sensitive word without permission. 

For more information on naming see our guide on naming your business. 

Create your strapline

A strapline is a short, catchy phrase that conveys your brand and your values. It will often sit with your logo and can help improve your brand’s recognition by appealing to your audience and setting you apart from the competition.

For new small businesses, often a strapline will give more information about what your business actually does, which can be helpful to customers until you raise awareness of who you are and what you do.

If you are most established, or it is obvious what you do, then a catchy strapline can be effective. For example Highland Spring’s ‘Water as nature intended’, and Irn Bru’s ‘Made in Scotland from girders’ sum up the brands’ personality and indicate what makes them special.

Again, brainstorm some examples and see how your staff or people you know react. 

5. Create brand assets

And now comes the fun part - deciding how you will visually represent your brand! This includes developing the visual elements of your brand such as your logo, your look and feel, and how that applies across your content and in-person.

If you have a lot of assets (like flyers, signs, packaging, social posts, website images, product shots, etc), or different staff who will create things, it can be useful to create a ‘brand guidelines’ document, which lays out every visual choice you make for your brand and rules on how your business communicates.

Your logo, look and feel and content are your primary brand assets.

Logo

• Visual representation across formats. Your logo is the face of your brand - it must match with your brand position by visually representing your brand values and sparking the feeling that you want to portray. It will also need to be unique, recognisable and able to work in both large and small sizes. Consider that your logo will be used across your: packaging, any point of sale, print, physical signage, website, social media, emails, and your internet favicon.
• Spacing and resolution. Ensure the spacing of any words looks right and that you have a high resolution version.
• Not already trademarked. It must also not be already trademarked or similar to another company’s logo.
• Creating your logo. Design platforms such as Canva or the numerous logo makers online can help you create one yourself, or you may need the service of a designer.

Look and feel

• Colours. The colours you select help bring your brand to life. Colours are very emotive so select a palette that complements your brand identity and your product or service. Aim for one or two main ‘brand colours’, with complementary accent colours that you can use in your designs. Make sure that all of your colours work well together, and that you consider colour contrast for accessibility so customers can read text written in those colours, or against those colours.
• Fonts. These work alongside your logo and colours to create a unique look for your brand. Select two complementary but different fonts - one for headlines and large text, one for body copy and small text. Your fonts must be used consistently across your packaging, signage, print, website, and social media.
• Visual media. Create (or have created if using a designer) assets and templates to use across any visual media you will need. This includes designing any signage, packaging, print assets, social media posts, website graphics, presentation slides, etc in your brand colours and fonts. By ensuring it adheres to the guidelines and is ‘on brand’, it will be identifiably ‘you’.
• Imagery. Make sure your key imagery/photography for print and website has an identifiable and consistent ‘look and feel’ that matches your brand. This includes the staging of product shots. For example a pizza company may select strong colours and fresh, artisan produce in all of their product shots. 

Content

• Tone of voice. Your tone of voice is not what you say, it’s the way you say it. It shares your personality with everyone and should be consistent across all of your communications. For example, if you run an IT consultancy, and your brand values are ‘tech savvy, knowledgeable, welcoming and accessible’, then your tone of voice must reflect this. You must write detailed content in a simple and accessible way. Pull together a tone of voice guideline that details your brand values, your associated tone of voice personality, and gives examples of how to write and how not to write in your chosen tone of voice. 
• Marketing messaging. Messaging and persuasive content in your ads and on your flyers or website must reflect your tone of voice and convey your ‘reasons to believe’.
• Video content. Video is a unique medium that brings your brand to life so it’s important that it aligns with your tone of voice and brand messaging. 
• Reviews. Reviews are an inevitable part of life - some will be good, some will be bad. Ensure that the way you and your staff interact with both good and bad reviews is professional and ‘on brand’. Often bad reviews can be turned around when dealt with in a professional and personable manner.
• In-person. The personal interactions that you and your staff have with your customers must also adhere to your brand values. There’s no point having a ‘friendly’ and ‘fun’ brand value if in person your business representatives are rude or brusque. Remember your business must live and breathe its brand values. 

6. Sharing your brand

With all the work that has gone into your brand, it's now time to share it with the world by implementing it across your business, both internally to staff and externally to your audience and customers.  

• Internally
  • Hopefully your staff will have been involved with the branding process as you have sought their input and their feedback. Hold a meeting to ‘launch’ your brand and brand guidelines with your staff before it goes out so they can see a summary of the research that brought you here and the rationale for your chosen approach.
  • Your brand guidelines should share your proposition, values, name and tagline, and all of the rules of how staff should implement your colours and fonts and use the tone of voice.

• Externally
  • Ensure you follow your brand values in the way you do business, your ethos in how you market and reach customers, every customer interaction, and across all of your design elements like signage, print, websites and social.
  • Remember ‘show don’t tell’ - it's important that customers can see that you live your brand values - so if your brand values say you’re ‘sustainable’ - ensure that you are indeed striving for sustainability across every element of your business and back this up in action.

7. When you may need help

Although you can create and craft your brand yourself, you may decide that you need professional help with some or all the elements of it.

Consider whether you require the services of a design agency or freelancer to help you with your brand positioning, and/or to help design your logo and other brand assets. 

Whilst there are many tools out there to help you design your logo and assets yourself, this may be beyond your skillset or you may need the specialised services of a designer when designing expensive and important assets, such as your product packaging, your signage, and your logo.

For more information on branding and marketing contact your local Business Gateway office today.